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Diary of an SEO trial (part 2)

UK or further afield?
SEO is a time consuming business. It requires someone with ability and knowledge to write copy and painstakingly tweak words and structure of your website. SEO is still an emerging segment and a wide range of standards exists. Over the past few years we had tried a variety of different companies in the UK, none of which fully delivered the results they promised.

We were working to a tight budget and this was probably part of the problem. The market appears to be split into those companies that are cheap and do the very basics, which will have very little effect and then those which are good but expensive. We wanted something in the middle. Eventually, we felt that as this is a time consuming and skilled task, the work leant itself to a company outside the UK where skilled labour is less expensive. Various people in our company had worked on IT outsourcing projects with Indian companies before and understood the benefits and potential downsides.

For many years India has been an area growing in popularity for British companies to outsource IT development to. Even though there has been somewhat of a consumer backlash against Indian call centres of late, the outsourcing of IT projects continues to grow in popularity. There is a very good IT skills base there and wage rates are in the region of $10-15 (£5-8) per hour. The same skills will cost many times that in the UK.

The main issues tend to revolve around communication. And these issues can lead to serious errors and delays in IT projects. We decided that providing we could locate a company we were able to communicate with it would make for an interesting trial project, and the potential upsides were worth making the initial investment.

Selection
On the face of it, you would have thought selection would be easy. Type into Google ?SEO India? and the very best SEO companies would be listed at the top. However, it wasn?t that easy. SEO India is just one search term, different companies optimised their websites for different search terms. I ended up with a long list, which I then narrowed down by selecting the non-corporate organisations where I felt my business would mean something and with whom I could develop a relationship.

Then reading their websites I looked at:
a) The quality of the information they provided on SEO,
b) The quality of their websites,
c) How well Google ranked their website, and
d) The range of services they offered.

After this my shortlist came down to just three. After emailing them and noting the speed and quality of response I checked out references and I had my favourite.

However I still felt uneasy about this, I had not yet developed any rapport with the company and was not prepared to part with any cash. So I brought in the services of a local SEO consultant. Someone who has been in SEO for years and had worked with an Indian SEO company before (if you are wondering why I didn?t use them they were one of the largest and too expensive for my budget). I gave him a brief to check out the services of my selected company, he charged just £75 for a four-page report outlining his view on the strengths and weaknesses of their proposal. I forwarded the report to the company and was pleasantly surprised by the responses. Where he had challenged them in certain areas they responded with sensible answers. I contacted them by telephone and spoke to the account manager there. Conversation was slow but we understood each other well enough. I felt reassured that I could work with this company and finalised my decision to begin the trial.

Search terms
The first two questions many SEO companies tend to ask are:
1. How many search terms did I want to optimise the website for, and
2. Which search terms did I want them to optimise?

These are important questions for an SEO company because the former will dictate how much the service will cost. It takes a lot longer to optimise a website for 40 search terms than it does for five.

This company has three packages on offer, 10, 20 and 40 keywords. The more words you have the greater the monthly payment, but the cheaper the rates are per hour. I initially selected just 10 words, as this was a trial, we would see how they got on. However they convinced me to move up to 20 words as the package offered better value.

Now, which 20 SEO phrases did I want them to optimise? Easy question to ask, difficult to answer. What ended up happening was that I came up with some, and they used specialist tools and techniques to suggest others based on my original suggestions. As I am in the retail technology business, my phrases included related words that I know our customers use. The key to this is to ask a few customers what they would type if looking for a particular item in Google. I selected a group of phrases and actually tested these on some of the tools I know about. When happy, I submitted them and the Indian company came back with 25 suggestions. Many were interesting and valuable, some just a little quirky; ?Business Point Sale Small Software? doesn?t feel like a term many people would type. Anyway, most were great so I removed the strange ones and we had our list agreed.

Next time we get our project plan and the project begins.

September/October 2010
issue 61
available now